In emergency situations it is necessary for emergency personnel, such as firefighters, EMS teams and law enforcement personnel to gain access to the interior spaces of buildings, such as a burning structure. Commonly, locked doors which are encountered within the structure, are forcibly opened using a tool such as a “Haligan” crowbar type tool. Thus, emergency personnel training involves teaching the skill of forcibly entering spaces through locked doors using such tools. As with the teaching of any skill, the relevant techniques are best taught through repetitive practice wherein the students practice the techniques of prying open locked doors. It will be appreciated that where ordinary doors are used for training purposes, these doors are damaged by the students and many doors are ruined during training.
It is, therefore, not practical to utilize and ruin ordinary doors during training. Accordingly, several forcible entry door simulators have been developed which are reusable and allow students to practice the techniques of forcible door entry. Illustrative simulators are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,906,493—Bishop and U.S. Pat. No. 6,877,988—Phillips et al and in U.S. Patent Application Publications Nos. 2005/0050816—Manning et al and 2008/0014564—Allen. Known simulators suffer from one or more shortcomings, such as being unduly complicated and expensive, utilizing standard doors which are readily damaged, failing to provide a realistic training experience and not being truly reusable a sufficient number of times, which render their use impractical. Accordingly, there is a need for a forcible entry door simulator which is inexpensive to construct, durable, easy to use and to reset for re-use, reusable over and over again and which provides a realistic training experience through which students can become skilled at the techniques of forcible entry through locked doors.